Emotion - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 11|Session 3

Overview

Western psychology tends to be concerned with the valance (“positive,“ “negative”) of an emotion, while Buddhism tends to emphasize the wholesomeness or not of a particular emotional experience. Buddhism insist that emotions can be regulated with cognitive strategies, while Western psychology has tended to assume that emotions are exactly that part of human mental life most apt to degrade normal systems of cognitive reasoning and control. Buddhist approaches to emotion, place, great emphasis on the power of compassion and provide specific methods for its cultivation; in contrast, compassion has been relatively ignored in the Western lexicon of emotion.

Finally, Buddhist emphasize the importance of first person accounts based upon the premise that accurate first person reports require systematic training. Self reports of emotional experience are frequently obtained in Western research, but there is a little emphasis on how specific training might improve introspective access. The time is clearly ripe for systematic examination of the points of divergence and overlap between Buddhist and Western understandings of emotion. Why do our two traditions disagree about the extent to which emotion can be voluntarily controlled? Can evolutionary and Buddhist views of emotion be reconciled, and, if so, on what grounds? How far might new brain research on interfaces between cognitive and affective functioning cast new light on traditional Buddhist understandings of the role of emotion in cognitive function?

Dialogue 11
4 sessions
September 14, 2003
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

B. Alan Wallace is president of The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the ahilosophy of science, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religious Studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, 13 authored, and contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion.

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Dacher Keltner is Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being. He received his B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in 1984, his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989, and then completed a 3 year post doctoral fellowship in affective science with Paul Ekman at UC San Francisco. He has conducted empirical studies in three areas of inquiry. A first looks at the determinants and effects of power, hierarchy, and social class. A second is concerned with the morality of everyday life, and how we negotiate moral truths in teasing, gossip, and other reputational matters. A third and primary focus is on the biological and evolutionary basis of the benevolent affects, including compassion, awe, love, gratitude, and laughter and modesty. He is the author of over 65 articles on these topics. He has received several awards, including the 2001 Positive Psychology prize for research excellence, the 2002 Western Psychological Association prize for outstanding research for an investigator under 40, and the UC Berkeley Letters and Science Distinguished Teaching award. His research has been supported by several private foundations and the NIH.

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Daniel Gilbert is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from the University of Colorado at Denver in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985. He was the winner of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, and he has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences. He has published numerous chapters and research articles in psychology, several works of science fiction, and is the editor of The Handbook of Social Psychology. His experimental work focuses on three topics: ordinary personology (how people make inferences about the internal states and traits of others), human credulity (why people tend to believe what they should not), and affective forecasting (how and how well people predict their emotional reactions to future events).

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Daniel Kahneman is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. His research has ranged widely. He has studied basic processes of vision, including masking and apparent motion, pupillary measures of effort, and the role of grouping factors in visual attention. In collaboration with Amos Tversky he initiated the study of judgmental heuristics and developed prospect theory and a treatment of framing effects in decision making. He has also studied fairness in economic decision making, the valuation of public goods and the psychology of juries. His main current interest is in hedonic psychology and the development of measures of well-being that could serve as indicators of human welfare for purposes of policy evaluation. He has written one book, edited three others, and published over 120 articles. He is the recipient of several honors, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and the Hilgard Award for Career Contribution to General Psychology, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Econometric Society.

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Georges Dreyfus is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of religion from the University of Virginia. His dissertation, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology in Buddhist Tradition, was done under the direction of Paul Jeffrey Hopkins. He serves as the co-chair for the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion and is also a member of their Steering Committee. His languages of specialization include Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pali. He has published 5 books, including Tibetan Interpretations (1997) and The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (2002), and many articles. He was the recipient of a Foreign Language Area Study Fellowship in 1988-89, a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 1989-90, and a National Endowment for the Humanities award in 1994-95.

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Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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Matthieu Ricard, PhD, is a Buddhist monk at Schechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a PhD in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate FrancoisJacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (1969).He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has served as the French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel); The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan); Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Import-ant Skill; and Why Meditate?. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, Matthieu has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan. He devotes all of the proceeds from his books and much of his time to 120 humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, and India—and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage—through his charitable association, Karuna-Shechen. Ricard has been deeply involved in the work of the Mind & Life Institute for many years.

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Richard J. Davidson, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s of arts and PhD degrees, respectively, in psychology. Over the course of his research career, he has focused on the relationship between brain and emotion. He is currently the William James professor and Vilas research professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author or editor of 13 books, including Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, The Handbook of Affective Science, and The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Davidson has published more than 300 chapters and journal articles, and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the board of directors for the Mind & Life Institute since 1992. In 2006, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he received the first Mani Bhaumik Award from UCLA for advances in the understanding of the role of the brain and the conscious mind in healing.

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Thupten Jinpa, PhD, was trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. In addition, Jinpa holds a bachelor’s honors degree in philosophy and a PhD in religious studies, both from Cambridge University. He taught at Ganden monastery and worked as a research fellow in Eastern religions at Girton College, Cambridge University. Jinpa has been the principal English translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama since 1985 and has translated and edited numerous books by the Dalai Lama, including the New York Times best-sellers Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness, as well as Beyond Religion, Universe in a Single Atom, and Transforming the Mind. His own publications include, in addition to numerous Tibetan works, Essential Mind Training; Wisdom of the Kadam Masters; Self, Reality, and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy: Tsongkhapa’s Quest for the Middle View; as well as translations of major Tibetan works featured in The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He is the main author of Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), an eight-week formal program developed at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Jinpa is an adjunct professor on the faculty of religious studies at McGill University, Montreal; the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, Montreal; and the general series editor of The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He has been a core member of the Mind & Life Institute from its inception. Jinpa lives in Montreal and is married with two daughters.

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